ABANDONED CART RECOVERED

Five ways to boost checkout conversion

Improve Your Bounce Rate

Most websites and e-commerce platforms have a 70% bounce rate on transactions. This means that a customer visits the site, browses the items, adds one to their cart, goes to the checkout aaaannnnnddddd leaves. WITHOUT purchasing the item. This is called an Abandoned Cart.

Studies

Psychology studies show that humans closely guard what they already own. This means that on the whole, most would rather keep what they have (i.e. money), instead of trading it for goods that they don’t (i.e. your products).

This can make the idea of selling online a struggle.

In order for your customer to want to part with their money more willingly you should make it as easy as possible for them to purchase from you.

Try making it seem beneficial that they purchase from you. Whats best is you don’t even have to do that much.

Here’s how.

1) Streamline your checkout process

The less time that a customer spends on your page, the less time they have to doubt their purchase and cancel it.

I was working with a site where when you clicked ‘add product to cart’ it would add the product and leave you on the page. The company I designed the site for thought that this meant that customers would stay on the site longer and potentially buy more items.

However, after looking at the purchases over a six month period, many customers were just buying one item at a time.

Therefore, to me at least, leaving people on the items page was pointless. I redesigned the ‘add product to cart’ button.

Now when people click it they are taken straight to the checkout page.

This means that they can continue shopping if they want to, if they don’t, that’s fine. As they are already on the checkout page, they don’t have to look about for how to get on it and could purchase the item immediately.

2) Use follow up emails

If a customer has filled out their details on the order form, then abandonded the cart, you should still have their email address and contact number. One of the best forms of checkout conversion is the follow up. Send a message to them perhaps offering them a discount if they purchase within the next 24 hours or maybe a voucher for next time if they complete the transaction. This personal service will help gain their trust and show that you are willing to go above and beyond to make sure that they are a satisfied customer. It may even secure that customers returning business down the road.

The following data comes from a survey of 19,000 consumers in January and February 2012.

So lets see what we can gather from this data and utilise for the future for point 3.

3) Take away unexpected costs

When a customer clicks ‘add to cart’ (or whatever button your site has) they have decided to buy the product. What they don’t want to be hit with is more costs like tax, expensive delivery charges and processing credit or debit cards charges.

Take these away.

Try to include your tax in the price from the start. Add free delivery if you can. That way the customer won’t be shocked and angered with the hidden charges when they get to the checkout page.

You want to keep your customers happy, not feeling like they been tricked into paying more. Be upfront to stop those sales falling through.

4) Change the words ‘pay’ and ‘proceed’

‘Pay’ and ‘proceed’ are ugly words and they come with ugly connotations.

These can hurt your site when you want to ease someone through the checkout process. I’ve found that simply changing ‘proceed to paypal/checkout/pay’ to ‘order’ has greatly improved checkout conversions. This eases people into buying without making it seem like all you are after is their money. You can try variations on this like ‘click to order’ and see which works best for your site.

5) Ask the customer to register AFTER they have completed the purchase

The main point of this blog has been to enforce the idea that your customers want a simple, straightforward and fast checkout. They don’t want to spend 5-10 minutes filling in forms and details. Your customers should be able to do a guest checkout but also sign up to an account should they wish to. The best way to do this is to just integrate a tick box at the end, after customers have filled in their delivery details, that lets them automatically input this information and sign up. This saves your customer from being bored whilst also increasing the likely hood that they will come back

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